The Gate to Women's Country (2 page)

In the plaza arcade, where the gate opened, old Septemius Bird was waiting for her with his nieces, Kostia and Tonia, their twinned exoticism long since become familiar and dear. Though not friends of her childhood, they were neighbors now, and Morgot must have told them the summons had come. Beneda was there as well, even though Stavia didn't really want to see her, not right now. But Beneda was a neighbor, too, and she had found out about Dawid somehow. Well, she had a right, in a sense. Besides, Beneda always found out about such things.

“Alone?” she now asked. Beneda had become fond of rhetorical questions and purely exclamatory phrases, needing to fill all silences with little explosions of sound, like a string of firecrackers which once lit could not keep itself from popping, set off no doubt to keep her own demons away. So she repeated herself. “Ah well, Stavia, so you return alone, as I have done, as we all have done. We grieve, Stavia. We grieve.”

Stavia, who had loved her dearly once and still did, wanted to tell her to be quiet for heaven's sake, but instead merely smiled and reached for her hand, hoping Beneda would silence herself for lack of anything to say. What was there to say? Hadn't they all said it to one another, over and over again.

Septemius, on the other hand, knew how to be comforting. “Come on along, Doctor. I'm sure it's no more than you expected, and these girls of mine have been to the Well of Surcease for a kettleful. There's a nice cup of tea waiting.” His arm around her shoulders was firm and wiry, as though it belonged to someone half his age. Next to Corrig, who as a servitor could not appear in the plaza with her, Septemius was the one she found most comfort in.

As they returned through the empty streets, the observer Stavia, now in command of herself once more, noted the quality of light. What she had thought was nostalgic and sweetly melancholic was now livid and bruised. The light was a wound, and like a wound it throbbed and pulsed. If it had not been for the old man's arm about her shoulders, Stavia might not have managed
the last few steps into her own house where Morgot and Corrig waited with the tea, where Stavia's daughters, Susannah and Spring, waited with questions.

“So Dawid chose to stay with the warriors, Mother.” Susannah was thirteen now, her face already firming into a woman's face, with serious dark eyes and a strong jaw.

“Yes, Susannah. As we thought he would,” said Stavia, telling them the truth she had refused to tell herself. She had not really let herself think he would stay with the warriors, even though both Joshua and Corrig had known that it was certain.

“I wish for your sake he'd come home to us,” Spring said, repeating some adult comment she had overheard. Spring was only eleven, still a little girl. She would be slenderer than Susannah, and prettier. For Stavia, looking at Spring was like looking into the mirror of her own past. Now the girl added her own perceptive comment. “I knew he wouldn't come back. He never really cared about us.”

She knew more than I, Stavia thought, looking deep into Spring's eyes.

“What are you thinking?” Corrig murmured into her ear as he warmed her tea.

“Of me when I was almost Spring's age,” she said. “Long before I knew you. Of my first trip to the Warrior's Gate when we took my little brother, Jerby, to his warrior father.” She turned to her mother, murmuring, “Remember, Morgot. When you and Beneda and Sylvia and I took Jerby to the plaza.”

“Oh, so long ago,” Beneda, overhearing, interrupted with a little explosion of breath. “I remember it well. So very long ago.”

“I remember,” said Morgot, her face turning inward with a kind of intent concentration. “Oh yes, Stavia. Of course I remember.”

S
TAVIA HAD BEEN TEN
. S
HE REMEMBERED KNEEL
ing in the kitchen, picking at her bootlace to make it lie absolutely flat. It was a bargain that she had made with the Lady. If she learned the whole Iphigenia play, word for word, and if she cleaned up her room and did the dishes by herself and then dressed perfectly, without one dangling button or wrinkled bootlace, then they wouldn't have to give Jerby away. Not ever. Not even though her older sister, Myra, was already standing in the doorway, impatiently brushing the five-year-old's hair to get him ready.

“Stavia, if you don't hurry up with those boots, Myra and I are going to leave you behind.” Morgot had arranged the blue woolen veil over her head for the tenth time and had stood before the mirror, running her fingers over her cheeks, looking for lines. She hadn't found any lines in her beautiful face, but she had looked for them every day, just in case. Then she had stood up and begun buttoning her long, padded ceremonial coat. Time to go.

“I'm hurrying,” ten-year-old Stavia had said.

“Stand still,” Myra commanded the little boy she was brushing. “Stop fidgeting.” She sounded as though she were about to cry, and this took Stavia's attention away from her boots.

“Myra?” she said. “Myra?”

“Mother said hurry up,” Myra commanded in an unpleasant voice, fixing her cold eye on Stavia's left foot. “We're all waiting on you.”

Stavia stood up. The arrangement she had made wasn't going to work. She could tell. Not if Myra was almost crying, because Myra almost never cried except for effect. If something was bad enough to make Myra cry for no discernible advantage, then Stavia couldn't stop it, no matter what she did. If she were older, then she could have tried a bigger promise, and maybe Great Mother would have paid attention. At age ten one didn't have much bargaining power. Of course, Morgot and Myra would tell her there wasn't any reason to make promises or seek changes because the Great Mother didn't bargain. The deity didn't change her mind for women's convenience. Her way was immutable. As the temple servers said, “No sentimentality, no romance, no false hopes, no self-petting lies, merely that which is!” Which left very little room, Stavia thought, for womanly initiative.

This depressing fatalism swelled into a mood of general sadness as they went down the stairs and into the street. Her mother's friend Sylvia was there with her daughter Beneda, both of them very serious-looking and pink-cheeked from the cold. Sylvia's servitor Minsning stood to one side, chewing his braid and wringing his hands. Minsning always wrung his hands, and sometimes he cried so that his bulbous nose turned red as an apple. There were other neighbors, too, gathered outside their houses, including several serving men. Joshua, Morgot's servitor, had gone away on business, so he wasn't able to tell Jerby good-bye. That was sad, too, because Joshua and Jerby had been best friends, almost like Stavia and Beneda were.

“Our condolences go with you,” a neighbor called, dabbing at the inside corners of her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief.

Morgot bowed, receiving the words with dignity.

Sylvia said, “Morgot, are you going to be all right?”

Stavia's mother nodded, then whispered, “As long as I don't try to talk.”

“Well don't. Just bow and keep your veil straight. Here, let me carry Jerby.”

“No!” Morgot stepped away, hugging the little boy through his quilted coat. “Sorry, Syl. I just… want to hold on to him as long as I can.”

“Stupid of me,” Sylvia dithered, turning red. “Of course.”

The six of them went down the hill in a quiet procession: Morgot carrying Jerby, with Sylvia alongside, then Myra by herself, then Beneda and Stavia—who was trying not to cry and to look dignified at the same time, and failing at both. Beneda giggled, and Myra cast them an angry red-eyed glare over one shoulder.

“You little girls behave yourselves.”

“I am behaving myself,” Stavia said, then more softly, “Beneda, you stop getting me
in
trouble.” Beneda often said things or did things suddenly that got them both in trouble, though she never meant to. Stavia was more self-conscious. When Stavia got into trouble, it was generally over something she had thought about for a very long time.

“I wasn't getting you in trouble. I was just laughing.”

“Well, it's not funny.”

“You look funny. Your face is all twisted up.” Beneda mimicked Stavia, screwing up her eyes and mouth.

“Your face would get twisted up, too, if you had to
give
your little brother away.”

“I don't have a little brother. Besides, everybody has to. It isn't just you.”

“Jerby's not everybody. Joshua will really miss him.”

“Joshua's nice.” Beneda thought about this for half a block. “Joshua's nicer than Minsning. I wish our family had a servitor like Joshua. Joshua can find things when you lose them. He found my bracelet that Mother gave me. He found Jerby that time he was lost, too.”

Stavia remembered hysteria and weeping and Joshua calmly concentrating then going to the empty cistern and finding Jerby curled up in it asleep. “Maybe we can do something to make it up to him.”

“Maybe Mother will have another baby boy,” said Myra, not looking back.

“She's had three already,” said Stavia. “She says that's enough.”

“I didn't know that,” Beneda said, looking curiously at the women. “My mom only had one. And then there's me and Susan and Liza.”

“Mother had Myra first, then Habby, then Byram, then me, then Jerby,” Stavia confided. “Myra's seventeen, and
that means Habby and Byram are thirteen and twelve, because they're four years and five years younger than Myra, and that's how we keep track. How old is your brother? What's his name?”

Beneda shook her head. “About the same age as your brothers, I think. His name is Chernon. He's the oldest. He went to the warriors when I was real little, but I don't think he's fifteen yet. Something happened and he doesn't visit us anymore. He goes to Aunt Erica's house. Mom doesn't talk about him.”

“Some families don't,” Myra offered. “Some families just try to forget about them unless they come home.”

“I won't forget Jerby,” Stavia announced. “I won't.” Despite all her good resolutions, she heard the tears in her voice and knew her eyes would spill over.

Myra came back to them abruptly. “I didn't say you would,” she said angrily. “Jerby will be home twice every year, for visits, during the carnival holidays. Nobody's going to forget him. I just said some families do, that's all. I didn't mean us.” She turned and stamped back to her place ahead of them.

“Besides, maybe he'll return when he's fifteen,” comforted Beneda. “Then you can visit him, whatever house he's assigned to. You can even travel to visit him if he goes to some other town. Lots of boys do come back.”

“Some,” amended Myra, turning to glare at them with a peculiar twist to her mouth. “Some do.”

They had walked all the way past the Market District to the Well of Surcease. Sylvia and Morgot each took a cup from the attendant and filled it, spilling some toward the Lady's Chapel for the Lady, then sipping at it, drawing the time out. Myra took their offering to the poor box outside the chapel door, then sat on the well moping, looking sulky. Stavia knew that Myra just wanted to get it over with. There was no necessity for stopping at the well. The water was purely symbolic—at least when drunk directly from the well like this—and offered no real consolation except a reminder that surcease would come if one didn't fight it. “Accept grief,” the priestess said at services for the lost ones. “Accept grief, but do not nurse it. In time it will go.” At the moment, that was hard to remember, much less understand.

“We all have to do things we don't want to do,” Morgot
had said. “All of us here in Women's Country. Sometimes they are things that hurt us to do. We accept the hurt because the alternative would be worse. We have many reminders to keep us aware of that. The Council ceremonies. The play before summer carnival. The desolations are there to remind us of pain, and the well is there to remind us that the pain will pass….”

Stavia wasn't sure she could ever learn to find comfort in the thought, though Morgot said she would if she tried. Now she merely took off her boiled wool mittens and dabbled her fingers in the water, pretending there were fishes in the fountain. The water came from high up in the mountains where the snow lay deep almost all year long, and there were fishes up there, people said. The hatchers were putting more of them in every year. Trout-fishes. And some other kind Stavia couldn't remember.

“There could be fishes,” she told Beneda.

“There are fishes in the big marsh, too,” said Beneda. “Teacher Linda told me.”

“Vain hope,” sniffed Sylvia, overhearing her. “They've been telling us there are fishes in the marsh for twenty years now, but nobody's caught any. Still too contaminated.”

“It might take several more decades before they've multiplied enough to be harvestable,” Morgot said. “But there are some new things living there. When I was by there last, I saw a crawfish.”